Microsoft Azure Stack is an extension of Azure—bringing the agility and innovation of cloud computing to your on-premises environment and enabling the only hybrid cloud that allows you to build and deploy hybrid applications anywhere. We bring together the best of the edge and cloud to deliver Azure services anywhere in your environment.

Enterprise Smart Contracts decompose the “Public Smart Contract” approach, reflecting on both “contract” and technology evolution to provide a model for delivering on the promise of blockchain in the enterprise.

We are proud to announce our participation as a launch partner with the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance in addition to making the first reference implementations of Ethereum available in a public cloud. Ethereum was the first blockchain supported in Azure and it is evolving to address the needs of enterprises globally. Focusing on requirements like privacy, permissions and a pluggable architecture while retaining its public roots, Ethereum continues to widen the scope of what developers, businesses and consortiums can achieve.

As we get closer to the first public preview of the Cryptlet Fabric, I though it was a good time to quickly highlight what blockchain enthusiasts, professionals and developers should be looking forward to. The Cryptlet Fabric is designed to be the middle tier in the new proposed 3-Layered & Tiered Smart Contract architecture, so it will deliver things you would expect from such an implementation. It manages scale, failover, caching, monitoring, management…a long list of features, but what is new:

For the first time, developers can install Chain Core (Chain’s distributed ledger) in Azure or locally to start or join a blockchain network, build financial applications, and access in-depth technical documentation and tutorials.

In the introduction of Project Bletchley white paper in June, we introduced some of the requirements needed for building consortium based blockchains as well as Cryptlets, a primitive for next generation blockchain applications. Today, I'm proud to announce the release of Bletchley v1 and the next level of detail regarding the roadmap of features for Cryptlets.